The century is approaching its conclusion in a climate of growing tension. Conflict springs up between individual rights and collective duties, between local roots and cosmopolitism. It is present in the tension between economic development and the safeguard of the environment, the aggression of global markets and the desire to protect fragile economies, the pressures of emigration from poor countries and unemployment in the more advanced nations. There is renewed bloodshed between ethnic, religious, cultural and economic groups, and between nations.
However, as the International Commission on Peace and Food reminds us, "the perspective the world seeks must be based on a greater understanding of the inextricable linkages between peace, democratization, development, equity and the environment. None of these great goals can be achieved, without corresponding progress towards the others. [...] What are the foundations of this new intellectual perspective and what sort of strategies, actions and results will it lead to? It requires a change in the way we look at and think of familiar things like war, developing countries, democracy, agriculture, industrialization. First, we have to awaken from the millennia-old nightmare that war is a natural and inevitable part of human existence, which can perhaps be mitigated or kept far from our shores, but never really mastered or eliminated. [...] Most of all, the new perspective the world seeks should be based on a recognition that humankind is the master of its own destiny, that the external limits are not binding on us if we tap the unlimited creative potential of our own inner human resourcefulness".
These recommendations are the starting point of the debate among the Nobel Laureates and international experts gathering in Milan, to discuss how to transform conflict into an occasion for dialogue, growth and innovation.
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Lessons of Evolution
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Friday 6 December 1996
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The human species is the product of an immensely long evolutionary process which, starting more than 3.5 billion years ago from a single ancestral form, has given rise to all the microbes, plants, fungi and animals, including humans, making up the living world of today. According to the Darwinian theory of natural selection, as clarified by the findings of modern molecular biology and now almost universally accepted by scientists, each of the millions of successive steps in this extraordinary history resulted from the fortuitous coincidence of a mutation combined with a set of environmental conditions in which the mutant form enjoyed a selective advantage or, at least, was not so disadvantaged that its ability to survive and proliferate was imperiled.
Contrary to a belief widely held among scientists and often stated as established fact, this mechanism does not necessarily imply that the human species arose through a highly improbable combination of chance events, most unlikely to be reproduced anywhere, anytime. Chance does not exclude inevitability. All depends on the constraints within which chance operates.
In such an evaluation, one must distinguish between horizontal and vertical evolution. The horizontal kind generates diversity without significant change in complexity. It explains the great variety of species within each phylum and is largely ruled by contingency. Vertical evolution, which is the kind that leads to increasing complexity, is much more stringently constrained by both inner and outer factors. In the animal line, in particular, the development of increasingly elaborate polyneuronal systems stands out as a dominant direction, unswervingly maintained over more than five hundred million years. The emergence of humans or, at least, of conscious, thinking beings, is an obligatory outcome of this drive, not a "cosmic accident".
This fact gives meaning to the human condition, but also emphasizes the precariousness and provisional character of this condition. There is every reason to believe that humankind is not the crowning achievement of vertical evolution, but only the most advanced known stage in this process. It is a stage, however, that already possesses the power to significantly and voluntarily modify the course of biological evolution. Exercizing this responsibility wisely is the major challenge of the future.
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